McG still has some childhood issues to work out. The director is a successful Hollywood mogul with several TV series currently on-air and a diverse resume of films. Yet he still gets sensitive when people make fun of his name.

He got a bit of reassurance when he showed footage of his latest work, Terminator Salvation, at San Diego's Comic Con this summer. Scenes of future war zones with new Skynet robots battling the human resistance got cheers from the fans and showed him he was on the right track. Still, he brought up the name thing randomly.

"I mean, I remember when I was on Superman and people were kicking the shit out of me and saying, 'What kind of guy calls himself McG?'" McG said to a press conference after his Comic Con session. "It's the privilege of the public to just do that, not know that McG is short for McGinty and I've been called that since the day I was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan. There's nothing Hollywood about it. It's the function of being poor and having three Joes in one household so they didn't call me Joe, they called me McG, short for McGinty, my mother's maiden name. But of course, as I say we live in a shorthand society, people do what they got to do."

Such defensiveness may be unwarranted as people seem eager for his take on the Terminator franchise. Salvation picks up John Connor (Christian Bale) fighting the machines in the post-war future, but the focus is on a new character, Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington). We will also come across familiar faces like Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin) in the story.

Question: McG, in your first film you were able to completely do whatever you wanted because you were reimagining Charlie's Angels. Obviously Terminator is an existing film franchise so we're are you able to add elements to make it your own?

McG: Well, truthfully I think any filmmaker tries to go on a film by film basis and do what's right for what's in front of them. I'm very pleased with the Charlie's Angels pictures and what I was trying to do with those movies is just break down the glass ceiling, say you can make a successful female action picture. But that was a long time ago and I'm a different filmmaker now.

Now I wanted to make a movie that was about posing ethical questions to the audience and suggesting that the film won't be easy. It's going to be a little elliptical in a way you ride along the picture. So as far as the look and what we want to do with this, I wanted to create a new film language. We talked to Kodak about creating a new stock that had never been photographed before. We're adding three times as much silver to a color stock than had ever been added and that gives it an ethereal sort of quality that suggests something's off.

Something is wrong with the world that we're living in. I just wanted to create a very, very gritty language. I'm tremendously influenced by Children of Men. Hats off to that picture. I think it's fantastic and I hope more people get a chance to see it but by the same token, this isn't designed to be an art picture. This is designed to be a picture shared the world over, so you got to find that balance between that artistic take and that artistic look and what's right for a film designed to be seen by a great many people around the world.

Q: What was Jonah Nolan's contribution to the script and does the film end in a cliffhanger?

McG: The film does indeed end on a cliffhanger. Jonah Nolan is an extraordinarily cerebral guy. When you got Jonah Nolan on your left and Christian Bale on your right and Sam Worthington kicking you in the head right in front of you, it'll definitely keep you on your toes. I would have to characterize Jonah as the lead writer of the film. I don't know how the WGA rules work but honest to goodness, we did the heaviest lifting with Jonah and that's where we all got together and talked about what we were up to. He's just a very, very cerebral guy, you know. He and Chris are behind Memento and The Prestige and certainly the Batman pictures. They are deep, deep thinkers.

Q: What was your meeting with James Cameron like?

McG: It was a double dip. I was going to town to see Sam down at the Marina Del Ray space there by LAX and it was a complete motion cap environment. Sam's in his data suit and everybody's running around with little balls hanging off their leotards and I got to play with the cameras and talk to Jim at length. We've had several phone calls and he knows that I respect him a great deal. I did not want to move forward on this picture if Jim Cameron were like, "Fuck you. What are you doing? You have no business moving forward on this." Very simply I would have acquiesced and said, "You're right. You're the creator of what it is and I respect that." He was very encouraging and we talked at length about the story. We talked about Sam and most particularly we talked about his experience on Alien s and the idea of you can't live in fear. You've got to move forward.

Q: What rating are you going for? Obviously the other Terminator s were R but studios always like their big movies to be PG-13.

McG: We don't aim; we shoot the picture. We just shoot, shoot, shoot. That's not to say therefore it's going to be NC-17. I have no problem with a PG-13 picture. I just saw The Dark Knight and I thought it was a work of art. I thought it was immaculate and I thought it was made comprise free.

If they say, "Deliver a rated R picture," I mean that's really freeing. It allows us to do what we want to do with the film, so the film will rule the day. We'll all be looking at rough cuts together and we'll make those decisions. If it just comes down to oops, there's too much blood on the head of the Marcus character and that's what pops you into an R, I don't think that makes the film infinitely more valuable so I could back to a PG-13. If they want to get rid of, "Oh, you can't have T-600s carrying mini-guns," well then no, it's an R because there are certain things that are part of the iconographic nature of the film.

Q: The continuity in the Terminator films is always a little flexible and no one really minds because they're such wonderful stories. But T2 is ten years later but it's 1991 and John looks like he's 13. What's your take on the timeline when this starts?

McG: There's no doubt that the beginning of T3 for example begins with a bit of a punt as to what happened at the end of T2 and there's some re-juggling of the timelines. We're largely treating it as though the bombs have gone off. I'm not going to share with you what the date is when the bombs go off. We come into the picture in 2018 and we've done the best we can to honor the timelines that have been put into place. I think it ultimately feels very satisfying and if we've done our job properly then this will be regarded as the statement of the time and the place and the where, and the when, and the why and the how.

It comes from a place of doing a lot of research with futurists, with scientists who talk about how long it would take the atmosphere to clear itself out so you could actually go back outside and do your thing. We're trying to just sort of amalgamate the three pictures and amalgamate the intention and then answer that to the best of our ability. Again there are certain things that are in stone. The T-800 comes in 2029. We're building towards that place. Therefore if hardware should show up in 2018 that was supposed to be 2029, that's a problem for John Connor.

Q: What did you think when you saw the first Terminator?

McG: I've always regarded the first picture as a horror picture, as a chase picture. It's Halloween. What's the difference between Schwarzenegger in the first picture and Michael Myers in Halloween? Which is wonderful. I'm complimenting the pictureThe second picture I thought brought a level of complexity that you can't hope to achieve on a sequel. Sequels are toughHow many sequels are better than the original? Arguably the second Godfather. Arguably Jim's Aliens. Dark Knight arguably. Empire. But it's a short list, we all agree.

Q: Does the TV series, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, play into this film at all?

McG: I'm a buddy with Josh Friedman who runs the show. We had a meeting early on and we want to honor that at all times. I know about episodic televisionand what it takes to generate stories hour in, hour out every week. Josh was the first to jump on and say we can't chase their story threadsI say that as a huge fan of the series but at some point you've got to create some freedom and tell the story that you regard as most compelling.

Q: What's your relationship with technology?

McG: I think it's a scary thing and who here would suggest that humanity is in great shape? Just think about it, we're melting the oceans, we have a true population problem. I always talk about it if I type A and N in my BlackBerry, it types the D. That's artificial intelligence. It's no longer George Orwell. It's here. You don't work on getting happy; just manipulate the chemicals of your brain. How far can we go with that and where does humanity begin and the machine world end? We can deconstruct the human genome, so if your dad had high blood pressure, your kid doesn't have to. It's kind of scary and amazingThink about how much more quickly a computer can make a decision than our human mind can. Should that computer become aware, who knows?

Q: How does that relate to filmmaking, with the abilities of computer visual effects?

McG: Well, here's the thing, all the machines you see in this film are physics based. What you're going to see is not built that I'm aware of, but based in physical reality. All day long we're out there with ospreys out in New Mexico. Ospreys are those aircraft that takeoff vertically like helicopters, then midflight rotate and move to fly like a fixed wing aircraft. You just watch that, that's influencing us all day every day and it just here we go. What are the limits? Who knows?

Imagine how you felt the first time you saw a stealth fighter. Honest to goodness, I remember seeing that son of a bitch and I could not believe that was real. I could not believe that was real. Here's the funny thing: how long ago did we roll out those stealth bombers and the stealth fighters? 10 years ago? 15 years ago even? '89? Think about when that was on the books. '75? Imagine what some whiz kid at MIT or in the black ops operation of Langley. Think about what they're up to. That's the stuff that just sort of says enough is enough and it's a question. Rutger Hauer posed it, I, Robot got into it. It's everything. Asimov, it's everything Philip K. Dick [wrote about in] Does The Android Dream of Electric Sheep

Q: You seem very attentive to fans and critics, so how is that influencing your work?

McG: All I care about is how does the film look and feel because we're in the business of doing a lot of listening. Don't be shy. Seriously, don't you understand, we are halfway through the movie. My process is to look and go, "Hey Worthington, did you see what happened at ComicCon? We should do" I'm still making this movie. I've told everybody that ours is a transparent style. I have what I intend to do, but the movie belongs to you guys. That' s not bullshit. I will make my little 10 million dollar Merchant Ivory movies in the future. This is Terminator. I want us to collectively get excited about the movie.

Terminator Salvation is out in theatres in spring 2009. For more information go to the official site

McG still has some childhood issues to work out. The director is a successful Hollywood mogul with several TV series currently on-air and a diverse resume of films. Yet he still gets sensitive when people make fun of his name....